an articled clerk. Here he acquired the neat and formal hand that distinguished his writing through life.
One of Attorney Dunning's clients was Sir Thomas Clarke, Master of the Rolls, who employed him as agent to his property about Ashburton. An incident in his stewardship led to important consequences. A legal instrument was prepared by the young John Dunning, who forwarded it to Sir Thomas in his father's absence, and was accordingly taken to task by his father for his presumption. A letter was dispatched in hot haste to the client, apologizing for the errors which it was feared must be found in a draft prepared by a lad under nineteen, and which his father had not been allowed opportunity of revising. Greatly to the parent's relief, however, the distinguished lawyer expressed himself perfectly satisfied with the document, and volunteered to push the young man in his profession, and incur the sole charge of fitting him for a career at the Bar. Under this patron's auspices young Dunning, in the twenty-first year of his age, was entered as a student at the Middle Temple on 8 May, 1752. In turn he made acquaintance with Kenyon, afterwards Lord Kenyon, who succeeded Lord Mansfield on the King's Bench; also Home Tooke, who addressed to Dunning that Letter on the English Particle, which was afterwards expanded into The Diversions of Purley. Out of term these three friends dined together at a little eating-house near Chancery Lane at the modest charge of 7½d. each. Tooke and Dunning would generously add to this a penny for the waitress; but the more thrifty Kenyon rewarded the girl with a half-penny, and sometimes with the promise to remember her next time.
After four years Dunning was called to the Bar in
